Data Sorting World Record Falls

It's hard to imagine sorting a terabyte of data in one minute...but that's what computer scientists at the Jacobs School did...and for their efforts, they got themselves a world record at the Sort Benchmark competition. (Check out the full Sort Benchmark / UC San Diego press release.) But before you go, consider the fact that data sorting is a big deal, for a variety of reasons. Facebook ads and Amazon product suggestions are generated thanks to heavy duty data sorting techniques. Companies across the world are turning to data sorting to sift through the mountains of potentially relevant data that are piling up...data analytics in action.

The lead computer science graduate student on the project, Alex Rasmussen (pictured below), explained to me during our photo shoot in a Calit2 server room, that data sorting is a good way to flex a whole bunch of computing / networking / systems muscles. He explained it this way:

“Sorting is also an interesting proxy for a whole bunch of other data processing problems. Generally, sorting is a great way to measure how fast you can read a lot of data off a set of disks, do some basic processing on it, shuffle it around a network and write it to another set of disks,” explained Rasmussen. “Sorting puts a lot of stress on the entire input/output subsystem, from the hard drives and the networking hardware to the operating system and application software.”

For anyone following along, this is the follow up to the 10,318 seconds post.

Meet the (Electrical) Engineer in the San Diego Union Tribune

Electrical and computer engineering professor Gert Lanckriet was profiled in the "Meet the Engineer/Scientist" feature in the July 26 "Quest" section of the San Diego Union Tribune.

So check it out before the paper makes its way to the recycling bin. An image of the story is below.

NanoEngineering Department is a World Leader

The Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego is highlighted in two info-grahics that accompany the cover story of the July 19 issue Chemical & Engineering News "Filling Nanotech Jobs." UC San Diego is highlighted the undergraduate, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in nanoengineering offered by the Department of NanoEngineering.

The C&EN trend article, by Ann M. Thayer, provides some background on where nanotechnology in the United States has been, and where it is going.

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering established the Department of NanoEngineering in 2007. Read the inagural NanoEngineering at UC San Diego story here.

Take a spin through some of the exiting NanoEngineering research happening here at UC San Diggo: peruse the first edition (in PDF form) of the Department of NanoEngineering newsletter.

NanoEngineering professors from the Jacobs School have been in the news recently. NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang made headlines around the world for one piece of his lab's smart sensor research.

NanoEngineering professor Shirley Meng is the UC San Diego lead on a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The grant went to General Atomics and UC San Diego's Meng is leading a subcontract. Onell Soto from the San Diego Union Tribune covered the story.

According to Soto:

General Atomics will get nearly $2 million to work with the University of California San Diego to develop a battery big enough to store power for utilities, in which chemicals would flow through cells as power is needed.

Hat Tip to Saura Naderi

UC San Diego alumna Saura Naderi wore a fantastic hat to the opening day for horse racing at Del Mar this week. But you don't have to take our word for it...Cindy McNatt from the Orange County Register captured it all...including Naderi's hat (see below)

Computer Vision, Face Recognition and Bluffing

Check out this video illustrating a UC San Diego project involving computer vision, speech analysis and neuroscientific analysis. Video credit: Calit2.

The video includes Mohan Trivedi, an electrical and computer engineering professor here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.



Additional folks with "speaking roles" in the video:
Ashish Tawari: Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) PhD student at UC San Diego.
Clarissa Lock: Physchology graduate student at UC San Diego

Check out more videos on the Calit2 YouTube channel.

10,318 Seconds...

What can you do in 10,318 seconds? How many records can you sort in that time? (And we're not talking about flipping through used CDs in that cool music store you don't visit as often as you'd like to.)

We'll have an update tomorrow or Wednesday on the record-breaking data sorting done in 10,318 seconds at UC San Diego.

email me at dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu if you want the story before the story is officially out.

NextGen Nano Sensors

UC San Diego NanoEngineering professor Jen Cha is using a $300,000 grant from the U.S Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop nanoscale materials for biological and chemical sensing for health and environmental monitoring. Cha and her research team are hoping to find routes to fabricate arrays of nanoscale materials for medical diagnostics or for security sensing that does not require high engineering costs. For these types of applications to make a “real world” impact, the production of the devices needs to be kept at an absolute minimum, Cha explained.

“If we can get around the problem of repeatedly needing an expensive tool, such as those used for semiconductor chip manufacturing (i.e. lithography), and still be able to achieve sub-50 nanometer resolution, that would be pretty revolutionary for applications such as low-cost diagnostics and chemical sensors,” she said.